Rejoice and believe in the Gospel, the ‘good news’! Today I examine the question ‘what is so good about it’!
Imagine a woman suffering from an incurable illness with 3 young children at home. Suppose one day the doctors found a cure for her, can you imagine the doctor running to meet her shouting enthuasiastically ‘Good news, good news’!!
Well the only reason it’s good news is that she already knows the bad news, that she’s dying!
But imagine if the same lady denied the fact that she’s ill and the doctor said to her ‘good news, good news’! She’d simply brush him off saying ‘i’m not sick, leave me alone’!
In the Gospels we can see that there was no sign of people who didn’t believe in God. Spirits and demons and all that type of stuff was normal and even king Herod believed so much in spirituality that he went out of his way to try to get Jesus killed!
I’m not aware of a single example of Jesus meeting an atheist….I might be wrong!
And so these people were aware of God, aware of good and evil….and so the message of the Gospel (forgiveness, love and mercy) came as good news.
In today’s world the majority seem to be some sort of cross between athesists and a cocktail of different spiritualities. If we were all dogs, I think we’d see a lot of cross breds or mungrels with a bit of atheism and a pinch of christianity with a spice of new age to liven things up!
But because in general people just aren’t bothered, like the lady in denial of her illness, the ‘good news’ of the Gospel is rejected as the bad news of superstitious men!
And so my dear friends, for Jesus to be good news, we need to acknowledge firstly the bad news, we are broken sinners in need of doctor Jesus’ cure!